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Oh That Dubya! You can call him a lot of things, but apologetic is not one of them. When he does something, he sticks to his guns. Good, bad or indifferent. At the moment I am hard pressed to recall the good, but the bad and indifferent decisions have to date impacted us all. No matter how many mistakes he makes, when given the opportunity to make amends, he instead tries to justify them.
He had that opportunity last week during his state of the union address, but true to form, he chose to stand his ground. You could almost see the cowboy hat and his hands on his six shooters as he leveled his gaze at those in the audience who had dared to criticize him on the topic du jour on capital hill.
That of course is the illegal wiretapping of private citizens in a search to find terrorists phoning home to request more money and supplies for their sleeper cells. That, or to discover the next plot to attack the American homeland, which I am sure any terrorist would do on a phone capable of being tapped.
As he squinted his eyes and mustered up his best Gary Cooper in “High Noon” impersonation he attempted to justify it by saying “I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al Qaeda operatives and affiliates to and from America.” Well Dubya, if we already know who these “suspected” al Qaeda operatives are, why not just round them up and run them out of town on a rail?
He continued to defend his actions by saying, “previous Presidents have used the same constitutional authority I have, and federal courts have approved the use of that authority”. Well yes you are right about that and I will get to the history in a moment, but as I say to my kids all the time “If Kenny jumped off the roof, would you?”
The response appears to be the same from Dubya as it was when my kids were much younger, yes. Both seem to stem from the same adolescent mindset, well if he did it why can’t I? The answer to the question in Dubyas’s case, he just has to look at history to see why not, and why so many people are up in arms about this breech of a primary civil liberty.
As soon as the telephone began covering the American landscape in the 1920’s you had to know that somebody would find a way to tap in and do a little eavesdropping. That distinction goes to the then newly appointed head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Under the guise of looking for bootleggers during prohibition, J. Edgar went hog-wild using bugs and wiretaps at his discretion and completely unregulated.
This despite the fact that some forward thinking states had laws forbidding them, but there was no federal law preventing J. Edgar from using his favorite little gadgets. It wasn’t until 1934 when Congress, tired of Hoover’s renegade ways, passed a law preventing wiretapping. For a brief period of time Ma Bell and the citizens of the United States were safe from the prying ears of the government. The key word there being “brief”.
Then came World War II and with it the fear of espionage by Japanese and German sympathizers residing in the US. So setting the stage for Dubya some 70 years later, then President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened Pandora’s Box. Without the permission of Congress, he instructed his attorney general and J. Edgar to begin eavesdropping on “persons suspected of subversive activities”. Sound familiar?
Once the box was opened again J. Edgar was all over it. It was only a matter of time before his original mandate to focus on Japanese and German diplomats was self expanded to include Japanese and German immigrants. And if you think the end of the war would set things back to the way they were, you probably think that fairy tales are works of non-fiction.
Now that J. Edgar had his foot firmly implanted in the cracked open door he wasn’t going to move it for anything or anybody. Now that the Evil Axis powers were defeated, he played on America’s newest fear, communism. He found a sympathetic ear in President Harry Truman’s attorney general, Tom Clark, who expanded the still unapproved wiretapping policy to include “domestic subversives”. This swung the door wide open for Hoover who gladly walked through it knowing that “domestic subversives” could mean anybody.
And I mean anybody. He had wiretaps on everyone from protesters to Presidents. Hoover compiled files on actors, journalists, musicians, prominent political leaders, and anybody else he felt like digging up dirt on. Most of the time he did it not for the good of the nation, but for the good of J. Edgar Hoover. Many times he tried to use the information he accumulated to blackmail those he felt were a threat to the FBI or his askewed version of what America was all about.
One such instance was during the 1960’s. Hoover viewed the civil rights movement and their leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King as a threat to the American way of life. He felt that they were subversive communist radicals who needed to be dealt with. With the approval of then attorney general, Robert Kennedy, he sent his wiretapping spies into overdrive on all of the leaders of the movement, especially King.
While their wiretapping and bugging didn’t turn up any proof that King and his associates were communists, it did record King having extramarital affairs. In an effort to discredit King, J. Edgar and the boys invited members of the press to listen to their ill-gotten recordings. They even went so far as to send a copy of the recording to King’s home in hopes that his wife would hear them, divorce him, and in turn, discredit him with the church and their congregations. Given what has happened since, i.e., a national holiday honoring Dr. King, I don’t think J. Edgar’s plan worked out. If anything it backfired big time.
If there is a cautionary tale Dubya needs to look at as to why not to “Jump off the roof with Kenny” he needs to look no further than everybody’s favorite Presidential punching bag, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. If there was ever a wiretapping addict, Tricky Dick was it. His pension for wiretapping was so over the top that he made Hoover look like a boy scout in comparison.
While the war in Vietnam was raging and the country was in turmoil, he was wiretapping and bugging everybody. Student organizations, anti war groups, assumed radicals, and newspaper reporters were among his favorite targets. He even went so far as to bug members of his own administration and his own brother Donald. What a guy!
But like any addict it is only a matter of time before they are caught or self-destruct. As we all know, Dickey completely self-imploded at a Waterloo of his own making, Watergate. Just in case you are too young to remember, or they didn’t cover it in your history class, let me educate you further. President Nixon, in an effort to find some sort of scandal on his Democratic opponents, had a group of five men hired by the Committee to Re Elect the President, break into the Democratic headquarters. Their function once inside? To place a wiretap of course.
Since that time the Congress and the public have been very sensitive to the practice of wiretapping, especially when it is mentioned in the same sentence as an elected official or the FBI. Which is why everybody is up in arms about Dubya’s current use of it.
It should come as no surprise that in this electronic age that the government now has the ability to listen to any incoming or outgoing phone call, e-mail or fax in our country. The National Security Agency, so secret it is known in certain circles as No Such Agency, collects enough information off of its spy satellites every three hours to fill the Library of Congress. So what was poor Dubya to do when you have access to something like that? Well use it dag nabit!
After all, that’s what J. Edgar would have done.
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